HoloLens Starts to Show How Augmented Reality Can Be Social

People love playing video games together, whether in the same room or remotely. I just saw a demonstration of how we might soon be able to play together in augmented reality, too. The demo was a treat because virtual reality and its cousin augmented reality--in which digital imagery is overlaid on your view of the real world--are still very isolating. You tend to use them while wearing a dopey-looking headset, and chances are that whatever digital imagery you're seeing, you're checking it out all alone. To start, we each picked one of four little avatars (all called Poly, short for "polygon") to hover near our shoulders; they looked like silvery robot heads glowing in different bright colors (mine was blue).